Digital archival of PDFs weighing a few hundred KBs to a few MBs is definitely a solved problem. And there are already arXiv overlay journals out there, and platforms supporting them. Tim Gowers' (Fields medalist) blog posts on this topic are quite informative:
Highlights: $10 per submission, plus some fixed costs, including archival with CLOCKSS. No Elsevier extortion ring needed.
Impact factors are of course kind of a chicken and egg problem. Need to have enough high profile journals move off Big Publishing, or have enough high profile ones started.
> When I was a grad student at MIT, it was easy to read papers; if your IP was from MIT, every paper was 1 click away.
When I was a grad student at <institution of similar caliber>, or an undergrad at <another institution of similar caliber>, accessing papers was rather painful off campus. One either has to use EZproxy, which might decide to block you if it doesn't like your IP range (say in a foreign country), or use some godawful proprietary VPN client that I would stay the hell away from unless necessary.
Today it's much easier, practically all universities participate as Identity Providers in SAML Federations and digital libraries participate as Service Providers. So you can just use your institutional login credentials to the identity provider page of your university. The service provider receives a signed SAML assertion that, well, asserts that you belong to your university and you are, say, a student. Most popular software is Internet2 Shibboleth (IdP and SP) in the academic field. It all works very well and has been for some time.
In the country where I live, you get access to office365, (physical) books, digital libraries (including Elsevier :)) and a wide variety of other services all via your institutional login.
https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an...
https://gowers.wordpress.com/2019/10/30/advances-in-combinat...
Highlights: $10 per submission, plus some fixed costs, including archival with CLOCKSS. No Elsevier extortion ring needed.
Impact factors are of course kind of a chicken and egg problem. Need to have enough high profile journals move off Big Publishing, or have enough high profile ones started.
> When I was a grad student at MIT, it was easy to read papers; if your IP was from MIT, every paper was 1 click away.
When I was a grad student at <institution of similar caliber>, or an undergrad at <another institution of similar caliber>, accessing papers was rather painful off campus. One either has to use EZproxy, which might decide to block you if it doesn't like your IP range (say in a foreign country), or use some godawful proprietary VPN client that I would stay the hell away from unless necessary.